Past and Present Energy Societies

Front matter

t AWE

Nina Möllers, Karin Zachmann (eds.)

How Energy Connects Politics, Technologies and Cultures

Inhalt

Past and Present Energy Societies How Energy Connects Politics, Technologies and Cultures Karin Zachmann | 7

Cultural Representations of Energy

Electrifying the World Representations of Energy and Modern Life at World’s Fairs, 1893-1982 Nina Mollers | 45

“We want to live electrically!”

Marketing Strategies of German Power Companies in the 20" Century Sophie Gerber | 79

Filming Electrical Consumption EDF’s Promotional Films (1946-2004) Yves Bouvier | 109

Energy Consumption Practices

The Rental Business for Storage Water Heaters of Berlin’s Electricity Company from the Late 1920s to the Early 1960s

Saving Energy by Shifting Clocks?

Energy Policy and the Introduction of Daylight Saving Time in East and West Germany

Energy Consumption Practices and Social Inequality The Case of Low-Income Households Karl-Michael Brunner, Anja Christanell, Markus Spitzer | 195

Societal Perceptions of Energy Resources

Cultural Meanings of Wood Gas as Automobile Fuel in Sweden, 1930-1945 Helena Ekerholm | 223

Environment in the Public Debate on West Siberian Oil Production from the 1970s to the Present

On Bioenergy and its Imagined Publics in Norway and Sweden Tomas Moe Skjelsvold | 277

The Long-Term Role of Energy in the Economic Growth of Europe Silvana Bartoletto | 305

Authors | 331

Figures and Tables | 335

How Energy Connects Politics, Technologies and Cultures

AN INTRODUCTION

“Where were you when the lights went out?” With this short, pointed question, David Nye opened his book on the history of electricity blackouts in America.’ These few words sufficed to set his program, namely to explore blackouts not as technical failures but social constructions. Thus, he used sudden darkness to illuminate the political, technological and cultural dynamics of high-energy societies.

In the studies that follow, we are pursuing a similar aim but with a different angle. To investigate how energy concatenates politics, technologies and cultures, we invited researchers from different fields in the humanities and social sciences to discuss energy as a resource, a symbol and a consumer good.” We focussed attention on a variety of sites in Europe and the United States and travelled not just through space but also through time - from the 19" to the 21“ century — in order to understand how energy was perceived, appropriated and put to use for a broad variety

1 | David E. Nye: When the Lights Went Out. A History of Blackouts in America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2010, 1.

2 | The contributions in this volume are based on papers given at the international workshop “Deified - Damned - Depleted: Energy as Symbol, Resource and Consumer Good”, organized by the research project “Objects of Energy Consumption” at the Deutsches Museum, January 20-22, 2011. We thank the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for the generous funding of the research project, the workshop and this publication.

of purposes. Presenting here the findings from these studies, we hope to contribute new perspectives on past and present energy societies.

At the outset, however, such an undertaking encounters a major difficulty. This is the problem of finding a comprehensive and definitive concept of energy, not just in the sciences but in technology and culture. In science, the physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman once stated in one of his famous lectures in the 1960s: “It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is. We do not have a picture that energy comes in little blobs of a definite amount.” There are, of course, formulas to calculate a numerical quantity that is always constant. But according to Feynman, this numerical quantity is an abstract thing that tells us nothing about the mechanisms and reasons for the different formulas.* Other scholars from a broad spectrum of fields - including more Nobel laureates — advanced the idea of energy as an all-encompassing concept. This becomes obvious in the introduction of physicist R. Bruce Lindsay’s history on the concept of energy: “No other concept [than the idea of energy, K.C.Z.] has so unified our understanding of experience. Without exaggeration we can say that every single aspect of human experience, whether it be what we observe in the external world, or what we do or what is done to us, can be adequately described either as a transfer of energy in one form from one place to another or the transformation of energy from one form to another.” But also Lindsay ends up asking: “But what is the thing that is transferred and transformed?” He consulted encyclopaedias and dictionaries but to no result. Fighting resignation, he asked: “Must you then pursue a whole course of university physics with its awful array of mathematical symbolism in order to understand what energy means, how it is measured, and the reason for its overwhelmingly important role in human life?”® Lindsay suggests instead trying another approach, namely to detect the key idea in energy. Thus, from a philosophical perspective he

3 | Richard P. Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, Matthew Sands: Feynman Lectures on Physics: Mainly Mechanics, Radiation, and Heat. 3 vols. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1966, 59.

4 | Feynman: Feynman Lectures on Physics, 59.

5 | R. Bruce Lindsay: Energy. Historical Development of the Concept. Stroudsburg, PA: Dowden, Hutchinson & Ross, 1975, 2.

6 | Lindsay: Energy, 5.

characterized energy as “constancy in the midst of change.”” This short assertion effectively translates the first law of thermodynamics (that energy is ‘conserved’) into a philosophical statement that is broad enough to guide Lindsay’s exploration on how energy emerged as a concept in history.

Scholars and intellectuals in the social sciences, however, differ from physicists because they are not so much interested in exploring what is constant but rather in seeking explanations of change. In doing so, well-known academics contributed to what has become known as the ‘energy-civilization equation’, i.e. a train of thought that deduced societal achievements (civilization) from increases in energy consumption.® “Because we use a hundred and ten times as much coal as our ancestors, we believe ourselves a hundred and ten times better, intellectually, morally, and spiritually.”° This is how Aldous Huxley, author of the dystopian novel Brave New World (1932), satirically presented the energy-civilization equation that many other writers and thinkers assumed was a valid construct. Radical innovations, such as the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, and the dynamoelectric machine, fundamentally changed existing energy regimes and led to the development of thermodynamics, the basic formulation of the relationship between work and energy in Newtonian physics, and the establishment of the first and second laws. Together, they also inspired scholars to define energy as the driving force throughout human history that is responsible for all changes.

That energy might fundamentally drive history is the central premise of this introduction. As a first step, it will outline, albeit briefly, how the deterministic tradition of a societal energetics emerged and changed against the background of energy transitions and societal evolutions. Contextualizing and historically grounding the developing energy-civilization equation will, it is hoped, provide us with the means to understand that the challenges of the pending energy transitions of the 21" century require a more reflective picture on the complex relationship between energy and society. This introduction then goes on to introduce

7 | Lindsay: Energy, 5.

8 | For an overview see George Basalla: “Energy and Civilization”, in: Chauncey Starr/Philip C. Ritterbush, eds. Science, Technology, and the Human Prospect: Proceedings of the Edison Centennial Symposium. New York: Pergamon Press, 1980, 39-52.

9 | Aldous Huxley: “Progress”, in: Vanity Fair 29 (1928), 69.

the anthology’s chapters and to show how the authors approach past and present energy societies and thus contribute new perspectives on the linkages between energy, politics, technologies and cultures.

REVISITING THE ENERGY-CIVILIZATION EQUATION

Many writers in 19" century Great Britain attributed the country’s becoming ‘the workshop of the world’ and the then wealthiest nation to the advent and expansion of steam power.'° The technical and popular literature on the European continent replicated this deterministic energy-civilization view in many versions. But early on we can also find a critical stance against this formulation. Although his statement, “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist,” is often interpreted as proof for the assumption that Karl Marx (1818-1883) subscribed to the energy-civilization equation”, Marx explicitly contradicted this view in the chapter on machinery and big industry in the first volume of Capital.” Here he maintained that not the steam engine bore the responsibility for the industrial revolution but rather the machine tool. “The machine proper is therefore a mechanism that, after being set in motion, performs with its tools the same operations that were formerly done by the workman with similar tools. Whether the motive power is derived from man, or from some other machine, makes no difference in this respect.” Others, however, were more impressed by the power of steam and subsequent heat engines.

10 | For details cf. Basalla: “Energy and Civilization”, 42-43.

11 | Karl Marx: The Poverty of Philosophy. Chapter 2, Second Observation, http://www. marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02. htm, Accessed 28.12.2011.

12 | In the online edition, the chapter on “Machinery and Modern Industry” is chapter 15. Cf. Karl Marx: Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One. Chapter 15: Machinery and Modern Industry. Section 1 - The Development of Machinery. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm, Accessed 28.12.2011.

13 | Shortly thereafter Marx stated again: “The machine, which is the startingpoint of the industrial revolution, supersedes the workman, who handles a single tool, by a mechanism operating with a number of similar tools, and set in motion

The British philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) subscribed to the energy-civilization equation when he reasoned that energy is largely responsible for material differences between societies.'* The more energy a society could harness from its resources, the better it fared relative to others. Based on his notion of physical power, Spencer conceived society as an energetic system. He interchangeably used metaphors of power, energy and force for developing his concept of societal evolution. Surprisingly, however, Spencer did not deal with the social use of non-human energy forms. That remained for Sir Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) who built on Spencer but advanced the use of non-human energy to become a main argument for explaining societal evolution. A Scottish biologist, sociologist, and city planner who co-founded the British Sociological Society in 1902 and strove to develop a concrete and applied sociology of cities that he called “civics”, Geddes subdivided the industrial era into a ‘paleotechnic’ and a ‘neotechnic’ phase. He distinguished ‘paleotechnics’, “a comparatively crude and wasteful technic age, characterised by coal, steam, and cheap machine products, and a corresponding quantitative

1» > « ideal of ‘progress of wealth and population” from ‘neotechnics’, “a finer civilisation, characterised by the wider command, yet greater economy of natural energies, by the predominance of electricity, and by increasing victory of an ideal of qualitative progress, expressed in terms of skill and art, of hygiene and education, of social polity, etc.”'° Geddes shared his admiration of electricity as an agent of societal betterment with many others. But his specific, energy-based framework of societal as civic evolution would find just one important intellectual heir, whom I will introduce later.

by asingle motive power, whatever the form of that power may be.” Marx: Capital, Section 1 - The Development of Machinery.

14 | Herbert Spencer: First Principles. New York: A. L. Burt, 1880.

15 | Cf. Andrew M. McKinnon: “Energy and Society: Herbert Spencer’s ‘Energetic Sociology’ of Social Evolution and Beyond”, in: Journal of Classical Sociology 10:4 (2010), 439-55.

16 | Patrick Geddes: “Civics: As Concrete and Applied Sociology, Part II”, in: Sociological Papers 2 (1906), 58-119, available at http://www.gutenberg.org/ files/13205/13205-h/13205-h.htm, Accessed 28.12.2011. See also Patrick Geddes: Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and the Study of Civics. London: Williams & Norgate, 1915, Chaper IV.

Similar to Geddes but framed in terms of a cultural theory, his German contemporary, the chemist and Nobel laureate Wilhelm Ostwald (1853- 1932) established energy as the core concept of his world view. Ostwald argued that the transformation of crude energy (rohe Energie) into useful energy (Nutzenergie) was at the base of all social change.” According to Ostwald, the efficiency of this transformation (Giiteverhdltnis) determines the amount of free energy that societies can put to use for cultural work. This then would be the second principle of energetics. While the first principle is the first law of thermodynamics (i.e. conservation of energy), the second principle serves as a guideline of cultural development.” Ostwald concluded his energy-deterministic worldview with the firm appeal, “Do not waste energy!” which he ambitiously called the energetic imperative.’? Ostwald’s reasoning on the role of energy in society provoked criticism from, among others, Max Weber, who accused Ostwald of deriving value judgements from hard science and thus adhering to a naturalism that does not foster but prohibit a fruitful discussion between the hard and the cultural sciences.”°

But Ostwald inspired other thinkers to expand on his ideas of energetics. One of them was the U.S. American historian and writer Henry Adams (1838-1918), who expanded his notion of energy beyond the concept of physics. In his famous 1900 essay “The Dynamo and the Virgin”, Adams developed a multi-stage theory of Western civilization that was based on energy. He differentiated four stages of increasingly shorter length, what he saw as proof of a historical process of acceleration. The first stage was driven by religious energy embodied in the Virgin Mary. This stage lasted until around 1600. The next stage was marked by the coming of the steam engine and led into the age of mechanical energy that lasted for the next 300 years. In 1900, symbolized by the spectacle of the dynamoelectric machine, the age of electricity supplanted the mechanical stage, but it lasted only 17 and a half years. By 1917, the ether that filled the whole

17 | Wilhelm Ostwald: Energetische Grundlagen der Kulturwissenschaft. Leipzig: Klinkhardt, 1909, 24.

18 | Ostwald: Energetische Grundlagen, 39.

19 | Wilhelm Ostwald: Der energetische Imperativ. Leipzig: Akademische Verlags-Gesellschaft, 1912.

20 | Max Weber: “Energetische Kulturtheorien”, in: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre. Tübingen: Mohr, 1968, 400-26.

universe would emerge as the only still available source of energy, but the emergent ethereal civilization was doomed to perish by 1921. Assuming that the universe relied on a fixed supply of energy, Adams expected an apocalyptical end of history due to the law of entropy.”

At the same time as Adams published his dystopian visions, other scholars also warned of the limited availability of usable energy stemming from the second law of thermodynamics. The British chemist and Nobel laureate Frederick Soddy (1877-1956) was among them. In his 1912 book Matter and Energy, Soddy stated that the “laws expressing the relations between energy and matter are not solely of importance in pure science, [but] they [also] necessarily come first in order [...] in the whole record of human experience, and they control, in the last resort, the rise and fall of political systems, the freedom or bondage of nations, the movements of commerce and industry, the origin of wealth and poverty, and the general physical welfare of the race.”** As a pioneer in the study of the atom, however, Soddy turned from pessimist into an anxious protagonist of atomic energy. Releasing the energy in the heart of the atom would allow humankind to escape the danger inherent in the scarcity of coal (and oil) and instead bring about an affluent paradise of the atomic future.”? Thus, roughly three decades prior to the euphoric though sometimes ambivalent assessment of the atom during the Cold War, Soddy preached on the promise of abundance that would be based on atomic energy. He also pondered the possibility of producing atomic weapons. Similarly, science fiction writer H. G. Wells foresaw the danger of atomic warfare and developed the vision that humankind would be able to use the atom peacefully only after having gone through a devastating atomic war. Wells dedicated his novel, written

21 | Henry Adams: The Education of Henry Adams. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961, chapters 25 and 33, quoted in David Nye: Electrifying America. Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1997, 143.

22 | Frederick Soddy: Matter and Energy. London: Williams and Norgate, 1912, 10-11, quoted by Leslie A. White: The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959, 39.

23 | Frederick Soddy: Science and Life. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1920, 22-24; Frederick Soddy: Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1926, 49-68.

before the beginning of World War I, to none other than Frederick Soddy.*4 The chemist Soddy saw a second impediment to the arrival of his atomic ‘Garden Eden’. This was the prevailing economic system. Therefore, he turned to economics and called for a major change in the economic system that would be based on the laws of thermodynamics.”

While Soddy derived his optimism for the future of humankind from his faith in the still-to-be-tapped mighty atom, many of his contemporaries in the first third of the 20" century focussed their hopes for a better future on electricity as a clean form of energy. Scientists, engineers, intellectuals, entrepreneurs, feminists, politicians — in short, representatives of all strata of society from many countries — expected to better society via electrification.2° One of them was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, leader of the communist revolution in Russia, who pushed electrification because he believed that the power of Soviets plus electrification would lead toward true communism.”’ British feminists cherished quite comparable hopes when they formed an Electrical Association for Women as a step toward their emancipation.” In the United States during the Great Depression, leaders of the New Deal and their followers championed the electrification of the Tennessee Valley as a means to bring the backward South into the 20" century.” Even before the turn of the century in Germany, representatives of the conservative as well as the socialist political camp connected their societal visions to the availability of electricity, not just as a power source but as a source for empowerment of their respective clienteles. Socioconservative economists as well as engineers hoped to secure the survival

24 | Basalla: “Energy and Civilization”, 47.

25 | Soddy: Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt, 49-68.

26 | For an early review of this literature, see James W. Carey and John J. Quirck: “The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution”, in: The American Scholar, Parts | and Il, 39 (1970), 219-41, 395-424.

27 | On Lenin and Soviet electrification, see Jonathan Coopersmith: The Electrification of Russia, 1880-1926. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992.

28 | Carroll W. Pursell, Jr.: “Domesticating Modernity: The Electrical Association for Women, 1924-1986”, in: British Journal for the History of Science 32:1 (1999), 47-67.

29 | Thomas P. Hughes: American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm. New York: Viking, 1989, 353-81; Nye: Electrifying America, 304-35.

of small-scale industries and traditional crafts against the competition of big industry by introducing small-scale electrical engines as power source.3° At the same time, the socialist leader August Bebel (1840-1913) extended and republished his socialist utopia under the title, The Woman and Socialism, in several editions. Therein, he envisioned the electrification of the household as the precondition for the emancipation of women, and he described his socialist utopia in terms of an electrified paradise.” German engineers also felt empowered as innovators in the field of electric power generation, its transmission, and its use to minimize the effects of entropy, thus following Ostwald’s energetic imperative.3” The engineers called for superseding the principle of profitability by the principle of efficiency, as the latter was the most important regulator of the

30 | Ulrich Wengenroth: “Motoren fiir den Kleinbetrieb. Soziale Utopien, technische Entwicklung und Absatzstrategien bei der Motorisierung des Kleingewerbes im Kaiserreich”, in: Ulrich Wengenroth, ed. Prekäre Selbstbestimmung. Zur Standortbestimmung von Handwerk, Hausindustrie und Kleingewerbe im Industrialisierungsprozess. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1989, 177-205. In the U.S., ironically, Henry Ford became a champion of decentralized “village industries” even though his company’s Highland Park and River Rouge factories epitomized the very essence of mass production. See Howard Segal: Recasting the Machine Age: Henry Ford’s Village Industries. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. The German inventor Rudolph Diesel strongly believed that his new engine possessed all the right characteristics to decentralize factory motive power, thereby mitigating many of the negative aspects of the factory system, which he believed could be attributed to the steam engine and its centralized power distribution system (belts, pulleys, and line shafting that conveyed power to manufacturing processes, machine tools, textile machinery, and the like from a central source). See Diesel’s discussion in his Diesel’s Rational Heat Motor: A Lecture. New York: Progressive Publishing Company, 1897, 18.

31 | August Bebel: Die Frau und der Sozialismus. 37" ed. Stuttgart: Dietz, 1904. 32 | Hans Dieter Hellige: “Wirtschafts-, Energie- und Stoffkreisläufe in säkularer Perspektive: Von der thermodynamischen Entzauberung der Welt zur recyclingorientierten Wachstumsgesellschaft”, in: Gangolf Hübinger/Ernst Schulin, eds. Universalgeschichte und Nationalgeschichten. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1994, 291-315.

economy. In comparison to the economist, the engineer would act as the superior housekeeper as he calculated efficiencies based on the inputs and outputs of energy in his works.34 This would entitle engineers to be the leaders of society because only they knew best how to govern the economy and society in the most efficient way.?

Similar ideas also sprang up in the United States. In 1921, social scientist Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) proposed a Soviet of Technicians, which would be more competent in managing the country’s industrial system than what he termed Vested Interests and their absentee owners.3° Rather than the wasteful, highly inefficient management of industry by the financial agents of absentee owners, the Soviet of Technicians would responsibly govern the allocation of energy sources, equipment, materials, and manpower. Led by the self-trained and self-styled ‘Bohemian engineer’ Howard Scott, subscribers to Veblen’s Engineers and the Price System soon envisaged a new currency to replace money, a currency based on energy instead of gold. Although the Veblen-inspired movement flowered only briefly as “Technocracy, Incorporated”, energy-based technocratic thought endured in many forms, including the ideas implicit in onetime Technocracy, Inc. member M. King Hubbert (of ‘Hubbert’s Peak’ or

33 | The most explicit conclusion drew Rathenau and Moellendorff when they required reforming the post WWI economy according to the principles of the warfare state into a social economy where the market was replaced by organization for the sake of efficiency. Cf. Karin Zachmann: “Wirkungsgrad contra Wertgrad: Zur Entstehung des Konflikts zwischen der technischen und der ökonomischen Auffassung vom Wirtschaften”, in: Technikgeschichte 62:2 (1995): 103-31.

34 | Julius Schenk: Die Begriffe Wirtschaft und Technik und ihre Bedeutung für die Ingenieurausbildung. Breslau: Preuss & Jünger, 1913.

35 | On the engineers’ claim to societal leadership after WWI see Charles Maier: “Zwischen Taylorismus und Technokratie: Gesellschaftspolitik im Zeichen industrieller Rationalität in den zwanziger Jahren in Europa”, in: Michael Stürmer, ed. Die Weimarer Republik. Belagerte Civitas. Königstein: Athenäum, 1985, 188- 213; Karin Zachmann: Mobilisierung der Frauen. Technik, Geschlecht und Kalter Krieg in der DDR. Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2004, 136-49.

36 | Thorstein Veblen: The Engineers and the Price System. Kitchener, ON: Batoche Books, 2001 [1921], available at http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/econ/ ugem/31l3/veblen/Engineers.pdf, Accessed 28.12.2011.

‘peak oil’ fame) and the historical framework put forward in 1934 by the American ‘public intellectual’ Lewis Mumford (1895-1990).3”

In the early 1930s, Mumford subscribed to Veblen’s diagnosis and critique of an increasing “dissociation between capitalism and technics.”’® In his widely-read fundamental work Technics and Civilization, published in 1934, Mumford explored the development of the technology-driven Western civilization. By expanding the framework of Geddes, whom he praised as his master, Mumford differentiated three historical epochs that had formed technologically distinct complexes. A determining factor for each epoch was energy. The ecotechnic phase was dominated by water power and wood energy sources. The paleotechnic phase was characterized by a coal-based energy system. The neotechnic phase, eventually, rested upon the modern electricity-based energy complex. Mumford analyzed the social effects of new power sources and technologies in great detail and he shared his contemporaries’ overly enthusiastic vision of the social effects of electricity.

The advent of atomic power and its ambivalent perception as both cornucopia and sword of Damocles in the fiercely contested Cold War

37 | On the technocracy movement, see Daniel Bell: The End of Ideology. New York: The Free Press, 1960; Edwin T. Layton, Jr.: Revolt of the Engineers. Cleveland, OH: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1971; Henry Elsner, Jr.: The Technocrats: Prophets of Automation. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1967; William E. Akin: Technocracy and the American Dream: The Technocrat Movement, 1900-1941. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977; and Howard Scott’s own, infamous “Hotel Pierre” address of January 1933, “Technocracy,” available online at http://www.technocracy.org/technical-alliancetn/ howard-scott/208-societyscott, Accessed 28.12.2011. On Hubbert, see Ronald Doel’s biographical sketch in the Handbook of Texas Online, http://www.oilcrisis. com/hubbert/bio_doel.htm, Accessed 28.12.2011. On the American and the German technocracy movement in comparison see Stefan Willeke: Die Technokratiebewegung in Nordamerika und Deutschland zwischen den Weltkriegen. Frankfurt/ Main: Lang, 1995.

38 | Lewis Mumford: Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt, 1934, 366. 39 | Near the end of Technics and Civilization, albeit briefly, Mumford even projected a future “biotechnic” phase that some analysts have seen as Mumford’s vision of a more sustainable socio-technic energy regime. Mumford: Technics and Civilization, 353.

nourished new thinking about the energy-civilization equation. The American anthropologist Leslie A. White (1900-1975) initiated this renewed discussion in the midst of World War II with the publication of his influential article “Energy and the Evolution of Culture” in The American Anthropologist. Leslie asserted that anthropology was a “branch of natural science which deals with matter-and-motion, i.e. energy, phenomena in cultural form, as biology deals with them in cellular, and physics in atomic form.”*° White established himself as an evolutionist against the anthropological school of Franz Boas by tying cultural evolution to human control of energy. Cultural evolution was to be measured by the amount of energy the culture in question was able to harness. As White explicitly stated: “The key to the future, in any event, lies in the energy situation. [..-] Should [...] the amount of energy that we are able to harness diminish materially, then culture would cease to advance or even recede.”*' That the great civilizations of China, India, Egypt, the Near East, Central America, and Peru had failed to advance after a phase of rapid development, White attributed to their limitations in the availability of energy. With respect to the future, he was optimistic, as he counted on tapping of new sources of energy, including atomic energy, which he saw as the most intriguing possibility.?* If the technology of nuclear fission succeeded, the energy resources would be multiplied a thousand fold. Even if nuclear energy were to fail, White’s optimism remained steadfast because, he underscored, “there is always the sun.” He expected that the sun could become the direct and thus chief source of power in the future.# In 1959, with civilian nuclear energy — i.e. ‘the Peaceful Atom’ — well on its way toward realization, White extended his 1943 cultural energetics framework into a book-length exploration of the evolution of culture to the fall of Rome. He meant the book to be the first of a three-volume project examining the evolution of cultures over all historical epochs. That energy was the main variable in his explanatory framework becomes especially clear from the announced

40 | Leslie A. White: “Energy and the Evolution of Culture”, in: American Anthropologist 43:3 (1943), 335.

41 | White: “Energy and the Evolution of Culture”, 350.

42 | White: “Energy and the Evolution of Culture”, 350.

43 | White: “Energy and the Evolution of Culture”, 351.

content of his planned second book, tentatively titled “The Fuel Revolution and Its Institutional Concomitants.”**

Four years before Leslie White published The Evolution of Culture, the American sociologist Frederick W. Cottrell (1903-1979) put another version of the energy-civilization equation on the book market, Energy and Society. The Relation between Energy, Social Change, and Economic Development (1955). In the midst of the intense competition between two political, economic, and social systems that constituted the Cold War, Cottrell aimed at discovering “the relations between the energy converters and fuel men use and the kinds of society they build.”4° This could help to evaluate the competing systems’ claims on the betterment of humankind, as the possibilities of change would not only rest on human beings’ values but also on knowledge of their physical potentialities. Cottrell stated that energy was the key to determine - or unlock - these potentialities: “It is that the energy available to man limits what he can do and influences what he will do.”4°

Departing from this thesis, he differentiated ‘low-energy societies’ from ‘high-energy societies’ and explored in great detail societal changes that followed from the transition to high-energy converters. His book, however, was not well received and was unfavourably reviewed by anthropologists, especially the followers of Leslie A. White. Marshall Sahlins, a former student and then colleague of White, accused Cottrell of an inadequate theory of cultural change, as Cottrell put values at the centre of his explanation of cultural change but at the same time let cultural change determine values. This not only prevented energy determinism but also prohibited “a satisfactory explanation of the origins of energy-based changes.”47 Cottrell himself came to the same conclusion, as he wrote, “perhaps the contribution of this essay lies chiefly in the fact that it suggests whole areas of ignorance whose exploration might increase the accuracy of thinking about the

»48 future development of human society.”4° However, Cottrell’s framework of

44 | White: The Evolution of Culture, x.

45 | Frederick W. Cottrell: Energy and Society: The Relation between Energy, Social Changes, and Economic Development. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955, 3.

46 | Cottrell: Energy and Society, 2.

47 | Marshall D. Sahlins: “Energy and Society: The Relation between Energy, Social Change, and Economic Development. W. Frederick Cottrell’, in: American Anthropologist 58:6 (1956), 1143.